Instagram, like any social media service, is no stranger to online harassment. And as we’ve seen before, spotting and stopping harassment is difficult for robots to detect, and they can even be tricked into harassing others themselves. So Instagram is introducing new tools that filter comments based on keywords. But will it help?
The tools themselves are simple. Just go to the filter, add whichever keywords you want removed, and the filter takes care of the rest. The words can be anything you want, and you just add them to the filter. The immediate issue, though, as Bloomberg reveals, is that already trolls have figured out a way around it, by deliberately misspelling words or resorting to new ones.
A larger issue, though, is the hands-off approach Instagram is taking to enforcing its terms of service. Farming out the job of preventing harassment to users is popular among social media sites because it keeps the company from having to take any sort of stand that could remotely be seen as controversial. Twitter’s support team, for example, is notorious for viewing absolutely nothing as a violation of their terms of service. It took Leslie Jones being driven from the service for a well-known troll to finally get banned after years of publicly coordinating harassment campaigns and singling out people to be targeted.
It’s true there’s only so much even the most dedicated service can do. But one hopes Instagram does more than provide tools for users. Presumably they’ll soon be able to see which users are getting filtered the most, and they should look closely at why.
(via Buzzfeed